posted at 8:01 pm on June 8, 2012 by Allahpundit

“Here’s the thing: the American Affordable Care Act stands there with Social Security, Medicare, health care for all Americans as a right, not a privilege,” said Pelosi. “It was opposed vigorously by two forces: one, the health insurance industry, and secondly by anti-government ideologues who do not believe that there should be a government role in clean air, clean water, as well as health care in our country.

“We don’t want our proposal to have any more government than it needs,” said Pelosi.

“It’s very private sector oriented, it’s market-oriented, it’s about prevention, it’s about innovation, it’s about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the American people because it frees them, unlocks them from a job that they may keep only because of the health benefits to pursue their happiness.”

The word “health” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution.

The health insurance industry “vigorously opposed” ObamaCare? Really? Isn’t the left’s core critique of ObamaCare that it’s a giant giveaway to the health-insurance industry when it should have been a glorious government-run single-payer monopoly instead? If this galactic boondoggle wasn’t all that was left of her Speakership, I’m sure Pelosi herself would be dumping on it as a sell-out to corporations.

As for the “idea” that O-Care is some sort of inalienable right rather than a statutory privilege, normally I’d spend some time parsing that logic but since it’s Nancy “Are you serious?” Pelosi, I think we can just go ahead and wave it off. Here’s a fun and timely bit of data for you as a counterpoint, though:

When asked directly if the requirement to buy health insurance is a violation of individual rights protected by the Constitution, 60 percent of voters say yes — almost identical to the number who think the court should overturn at least that part of the health care law.

Nearly nine of 10 Republicans (87 percent), two-thirds of independents (66 percent) and a third of Democrats (33 percent) think the individual mandate is a violation of individual rights.

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“It was opposed vigorously by two forces: one, the health insurance industry the citizens of the united states, and secondly by anti-government ideologues who do not believe that there should be a government role in clean air soda pop dispensing, clean waterdonut consumption, as well as health carecommunist indoctrination in our country.”

That terrible hag Nancy Pelosi keeps flapping her facelift about this, desperately trying to overwrite reality with her delusional pronouncements. Day after day she makes some inane distortive utterance, the entire orwellian script of decalring things ‘rights’ which ARE NOT. Claiming that socialized medicine is somehow equivalent to ‘the pursuit of happiness’.
She’s insane. And the sooner she’s out of office the better for America.

With Pelosi and her Marxist-minded minions, all Marxist constructs are rights, all religious dogma must be Marxist,all mandates are to be called freedom, and to cut thelist short:all evil is to be called good (Like abortion -it’s for the children)

Pelosi needs to go down hard. She’s nuts. She can rot away in the house forever… she just needs to be so politically tainted that she never holds real power again. She can be the Helen Thomas of house.

I fail to understand how any supposed “right” can require the provision of goods and/or services on the part of another. This would imply compulsion, which might violate the 13th amendment. (Yes, that means education is NOT a right!)

Actually, single-payer would be the polar opposite of a monopoly (a polymono?) In a monopoly, there is a single supplier. This results in higher prices and poor quality. In the opposite, there are many suppliers but only one consumer. This results in lower prices (because the sole consumer refuses to pay more) but also scarcity as nobody wants to get into that market and poor quality from those who do get in.

I hate to break it to people but there is a Constitutional right that you have that are only satisfied by the government forcing others to work to satisfy. The right to a jury trial. As we all know, the governments (federal and state) provide individuals this right by forcing others into jury service, as slavery essentially (being forced to work for $9/day at the threat of imprisonment is nothing less than slavery).

ObamaCare fails the Constitutional test not because the Constitution doesn’t provide any rights for individuals that require the slavery of other disinterested parties in order to satisfy but because there is no right to health care in the Constitution. ObamaCare fails miserably in any even halfway intelligent reading of the Constitution because it’s just not in there, not because it requires the government to enslave others in order to provide it.

Now, our federal courts have made health care a “right” (at the expense of enslaving doctors to provide it) for a small subset of people who enter an emergency room (which is a terrible and incorrect ruling) but even this only applies to a small number of people, just as the right to a jury trial doesn’t cover every single person all the time but only that small subset that find themselves needing a trial. Of course, if a large enough percentage of people would require jury trials, then there would have to be a serious determination of how accurate and fair it is to enslave so many innocent people in order to provide jury trials for others.

Also, you are enslaved by the government if a court considers you to be a material witness for someone else’s trial. In these instances, your time is no longer yours, you have no freedoms, at all, and your entire life is open to the public based on nothing more than the whim of the presiding judge. Anyone who has ever been in this situation understands how dangerous and insane such government compulsion on innocent individuals is (who are not even charged with a crime).

I got tired in writing the above and stopped my argument short, but more than the “right” argument (which is what people were arguing) ObamaCare fails in that the federal government is not given the power to dictate all trade of anything just because it is or is potentially “interstate commerce” (or the lack of, in terms of health insurance) and health insurance is certainly not anything detailed in the Constitution to be within Congress’ or the federal government’s power. That is where ObamaCare runs afoul of the Constitution. Not in the “right that requires slavery” argument but in how it violates all Constitutional limits on the federal government.

Of course, serious abuse of the Commerce Clause is nothing new, which is the scary part. We have a federal judiciary that knows no bounds, itself, and therefore rarely understands the character and meaning of the Constitution, but THAT is where the very serious ObamaCare Constitutional problem is.

When I heard her mouthing these words this week, it’s clear that Dem operatives have focus grouped the phrasing and realize that the vocabulary of this election cycle is decidedly Constitutional and conservative.

It will be interesting to see how much of it continues, whether low information voters believe it, what the reaction of the liberal base is, and if they win how thin the dime is they turn on to throw it out the window after the election.